This is a column about Weber barbeque grills, but the story came from a friend who is an engineer from Purdue University and I can’t let that pass without comment. There are other engineering schools but there is only one Purdue. It’s a place where student curiosity inevitably results in every piece of machinery being disassembled and some being reassembled, too. At Purdue it’s not that tearing stuff apart is a school requirement, the kids just can’t help themselves. This characteristic appears in varying degrees at other schools like Georgia Tech and Texas A&M, but Purdue does it with elan, they take stuff apart for fun.

Which brings us to Weber Kettle grills, which are proudly made in America. Weber gets away with this in a world where everything else is manufactured in China because grills — especially kettle-shaped grills — have a lot of air in them, occupy a lot of volume for their weight, and are therefore too expensive to ship from Asia. Weber Kettles are shipped unassembled, too, which means Weber’s labor rates (that would be you and me, working for free) are lower than China’s. It’s an American manufacturing success story. But it may be an endangered one.

Here’s how my friend explained it:

My charcoal grill has a propane starter. I put in the charcoal, turn a knob, push a button, and 10 minutes later my charcoal is lit. It is very nice. My grill uses the small 14 oz propane bottles. One summer I noticed my bottles were running out too fast. There was a small leak in the control valve. Weber sent me a new valve, for free. It was a different type and design of valve. They sent me some other parts to fit it to my grill properly. One of the makers of their valves had sent their production overseas and the quality was suffering. Weber found another domestic maker of valves and had redesigned their products to use them. You know me, I have an insatiable curiosity. I examined the old, leaking propane valve from my grill. I did some Google’ing and found the manufacturer. Most of their products go into small propane heating products, like the stoves in RV’s. Weber was smart enough to figure out this supplier was now making lower quality products.

While this sounds like a success story (bad valve discovered and replaced) what prompted my friend to write me was the notice he received yesterday of a class action lawsuit concerning these defective valves, which you’ll note have already been replaced. If he chooses to join the class, my friend has a chance to get as much as $5 back from Weber in addition to the parts he has already received. Reading the fine print he noticed that the law firm pressing the suit will earn up to $1 million for its trouble.

Here’e the key to this class action suit: the suspect valves were of foreign origin while Weber advertised its grills as made in America. They have have been made here, but one part was of foreign origin, hence the claim of false advertising.

Lawyers in the audience will argue that Weber shouldn’t have cut corners and this experience will make them both more careful and more honest in future. Maybe. Or Weber could go the other way entirely and do what every other American manufacturer seems to be doing and reincorporate as a holding company in the Cayman Islands with a separately-incorporated operating company in Hong Kong and a sales and distribution corporation in the U.S. that I guarantee will never — ever — report a dollar of taxable profit.

I don’t have a solution to offer here. I’m not suggesting that we first kill all the lawyers. Nor am I saying that manufacturers shouldn’t have to stand behind their products or advertise them honestly. But the system as it is running right now doesn’t seem to be working as well as it should at helping U.S. manufacturing employment.

116 Comments

Murf
February 24, 2012 at 4:11 pm

Greed is the problem. This about chasing the money. Unless there is a corporate change in our society to stop seeking to make a buck off of the rules of law, this will only get worse over time. It doesn’t matter if we have tort reform or not. If people smell money in the water, their greed will drive them to seek a way to cash in. Class action lawsuits like this where defendants only get $5 is a pretty sad statement where lawyers are gaming the system to keep themselves employed and we as a society not only tolerate it, but encourage it. This is who we are as a society and there are consequences for this and will be even worse consequences in the future. Lawsuits for profit have a way of sucking the life out of business.

Maybe we should put a quota on the number of lawyers that can be licensed in the US. Oh that’s right, they would sue us for doing that!

Ian Cheyne
February 25, 2012 at 5:07 am

There is one fairly simple change that would help the situation but has been heavily lobbied against by the various legal associations: Make anyone who brings suit against someone else liable for the cost of defense if the case is found to be frivolous or unfounded. This will not solve the problem but it will make the ambulance chasers think twice before they file …

David Stewart
February 25, 2012 at 8:53 am

Of course it’s about money. Everything’s about money, but ambulance-chasers are the worst. The US legal system spawned these leeches and here in the UK we’ve been going the same way for many years now. In fact it’s been a hot topic recently because a major industry has grown around “accident management” firms and personal injury lawyers. Amongst other things, it encourages people to make spurious claims for “whiplash” neck injuries and now the incidence of this is double the European average. Maybe Brits have weak necks. Maybe they just want the money. Either way, motor insurance premiums have doubled in the last three years mainly because of it. Everyone who makes one of these false claims is committing a criminal offence.

20 years ago I had an American girlfriend who mailed me a Weber “Smokey Joe” (you couldn’t buy them here in those days) and I’ve used it every year since. I now have a big one too. They’ve made a positive contribution to my quality of life and it would be a miserable injustice if the scumbaggery described in RXC’s article deprived the world of them. Something must be done.

David
March 1, 2012 at 8:47 pm

I used to think that same thing, Ian. But then I realized it would greatly favor huge corporations over private individuals. The company would just threaten to drag the lawsuit on and on, piling up the cost. Most people would be so terrified of having to foot the corporations legal bill, that many legitimate cases would simply be dropped. I think that solution gives the giant corporations to much a blunt instrument to wield.

Love it or not – Small claims seems to be their only option as AT&T somehow “forbids them from consolidating their claims into a class action or taking them to a jury trial” – Maybe US BBQ manufacturers could use AT&T’s EULA ?

Tort reform is badly needed but ‘saving American jobs’ is an old (30 year) joke.
The US has a two-tiered judicial system, one for the haves and one for the have-nots… the book With Liberty and Justice for Some is about this:

Tort reform? Yes indeed! We desperately need tort reform to ENCOURAGE more law suites? Don’t you all see? Litigation IS THE AMERICAN JOBS OPPORTUNITY! Forget about engineers and supporting manufacturing. Each American child should be going to Law School (another JOBS OPPORTUNITY!) so that we can all be lawyers and simply bring every company and person in the world to court!

Man, this is just plain logic, ain’t it?

Kirkwood
February 28, 2012 at 11:18 am

OK, no one else is enouraging you (shamefully) : What small claims court did you take an enormous German daily newspaper to task in? Do tell Bob!

The problem is that Lawyers have outgrown their original function – to fully understand and interpret the law for ordinary people for a (considerable) fee – and have begun to manufacture legal problems that they can then solves, for a considerable fee.
Accountants have undergone a similar transformation. Once they were there to count the beans and report accurately. Now they are there to analyse the beans and design ways in which the beans an look a whole lot more numerous than they actually are to some people, and simultaneously a whole lot less than they are to other people.

I think this is because mankind has become jaded and bored, and is hence looking for more to do.

Although I’m a retired accountant, I have to agree with Steve. When I discovered that the entity being audited usually negotiates with the CPA firm about the price for the audit, I was dumbstruck. Obviously, this entails a conflict of interest. How can the CPA firm be impartial and thorough when their client wants to both save money and get a favorable opinion? That simply isn’t possible. It leads to biased and incomplete work.

Another shock to me was when I discovered that most improvements to auditing standards resulted from lawsuits where the accountant was judged incompetent. What a world!

That’s why I took up computer programming as a hobby. The computer is completely truthful and impartial. (Although C++ had me stalled for a while.)

Rich the Mongoose
February 24, 2012 at 5:59 pm

Yep, I totally understand. There’s a fine line between a C “memory leak” and C pissing on you and forgetting to tell the OS! I guess not telling is as bad as lying to the OS, isn’t it?

That’s why I am only faithful to and trust my only one true love, Ada……Ms. Augusta Ada King is capable of being “objective”, multi-threaded, static, strong, safe and above all, very unique in her nominative capabilities…..What is objective of Objective C when you can’t even be secure? Don’t even bring up those foreigner cultists from Java! They can’t be trusted!

Mrs. Kim
February 24, 2012 at 8:38 pm

Easy there, Sparky. C is a good language. If you don’t know how to use it without blowing off your foot, I have some Tinker Toys for you, my son will show you how to use them.

Ada is a joke, no one except dinosaurs uses it. In safety critical devices and avionics, it’s all C and C++ nowadays.

Rich the Mongoose
February 24, 2012 at 10:19 pm

I guess you call me spark because you lack spark?

ADA may be ancient, but that’s what runs on life critical mission systems and those you don’t want to hack. You know, the ones you need to keep a spark for if you want to live.

I guess if you work on play systems C should be quite alright, provided it doesn’t do a memory leak on you! Last time I saw a memory leak with C in my business a few people lost their lives…..but I guess if profits are all you lose in your business…well any leak is OK.

I believe it starts with the fact that we train too many lawyers. The local university had built a new law school building just before I went through engineering, and another larger law school building in the past decade. Other evidence being my attorney friend describing the competition for the available jobs.

The response appears to be to create new specialty fields for attorneys and to inject attorneys into processes that formerly did not contain them (pouring sand in the gears). My observation is that a meeting of engineers usually is over quickly, with design decisions made after all the issues are laid on the table and weighed. When attorneys are injected, far more time is consumed (not only will this meeting drag on, there will be several more just like it) and the prioritization of issues is insane.

Robert Daniel
February 25, 2012 at 6:53 am

@Steve
who said
“The problem is that Lawyers have outgrown their original function – to fully understand and interpret the law for ordinary people for a (considerable) fee – and have begun to manufacture legal problems that they can then solves, for a considerable fee.”

You have nailed the problem succinctly. Trial lawyers even talk of “makeing” new law. a fundamental problem.. because that is the job of elected officials.

George
February 25, 2012 at 4:31 pm

Why move to the Cayman Islands, when we have Texas? In our corrupt kleptocracy, the class-action lawsuit is one of the few remaining protections we, as ordinary people, have left. It is not surprising to see an oligarchy like Texas try and take it away, but it is regrettable. So, no, I don’t blame the lawyers, I blame the dishonest corporate “citizens” who have broken the free market.

MAtt
February 25, 2012 at 8:28 pm

Maybe the problem isn’t that lawyers outgrew their function as interpreters of the law, but that the law became so complex as to require interpreters.

Martin
February 24, 2012 at 5:30 pm

Who is the manufacturer of the shoddy control valves? I now really need to go check my RV… Please put up a PSA update on top of your story

Roadsider
February 24, 2012 at 5:34 pm

For me the lesson here is to always cook with real hardwood charcoal.

Charlie
February 24, 2012 at 5:57 pm

DO NOT do that inside an RV.

Rich the Mongoose
February 24, 2012 at 6:33 pm

I totally agree with Charlie. At Purdue they might call doing that “Extreme Death Wish Tinkering”.

That ranks up there with the guy that was flying a glider over a cliff while tinkering with its flight dynamics control system based on Windows 3.0. The didn’t call it the “Blue Screen of Death” for nothing!

The odds of survival are better with the in-flight glider tinkerer than the cook.

Don’t do it. You’ll wind up featured in the next Darwin Awards.

GlennG
February 25, 2012 at 7:07 am

Guess you didn’t pick up on the part of the story that says the propane
was only used to light the charcoal?

Rich the Mongoose
February 24, 2012 at 5:39 pm

Amen to your entire column.

There are a lot of great theoretical engineering universities. MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cal Tech, Georgia Tech, but there’s only one practical, hands-on engineering school and that’s Purdue. It’s known as the the “cradle of astronauts” because only their aeronautical engineers were tinkerers willing to put themsleves on top of rockets to figure out if they worked. The computers constantly are crashing there because the software EE types love to hack and thus learn how OSes really work. The nuke gad students even thought up and tried to build a system to warm up their offices by recirculating water from their teaching reactor in the 70’s. They even have a degree program for the real talented tinkerers that are so far off the wall and so unconventionally driven that they are called “Interdisciplinary Engineers” and “Multi-Disciplinary Engineers” (IDE and MDE). They also believe engineering should be taught from Kidergartners to college so they have a special department of engineers dedicated to teaching tinkering called “Engineering Education” (ENE). At Purdue, engineering is a cult, a way of life, not a study discipline. That’s why the “Rube Goldberg” contest started there and why sex is only revered if done via mechanical means…..

There is no doubt, the system is broken. Just ask any Purdue Engineer. Tinkering is now banned in America by product liability lawyers. That’s why products are failing all the time and lawyers, not the victims are getting rich.

Remember the golden rule of modern American business….them that already has politicians in their pockets gets, not them that innovates or works hard to build it!

Mrs. Kim
February 24, 2012 at 8:49 pm

Sound like a bunch of hacks to me. You an alum, ‘Goose?

BTW, where I come from, Purdue is referred to as “Pur-Don’t”. I have to say I’ve worked with some decent engineers from that school, but none of them were exactly world-beaters. But what they lacked in talent or intelligence, they generally made up for with hard work. There is something to be said for that.

Rich the Mongoose
February 24, 2012 at 10:15 pm

I guess your English is limited Mrs. Kim. If so, there’s a good chance you might be an engineer. You are confusing Pur-dont with the Stank-ford and sMIT-ten boys.

A mongoose is a lot different than a goose. They called me that because I bit executives to death for sport.

Metalman
February 28, 2012 at 11:43 am

This reminds me a lot of experimental physicists, who tend to be a jack of all trades at getting their experiments to work. If you’re a new Ph.D. just trying to get along, you discover very quickly that you have tinker with pretty ancient equipment to get by before you can justify any funding for newer (used) equipment.

cthulhu
February 29, 2012 at 8:26 pm

what bullshit. Purdue is a good solid “design” school, but so are Texas A&M, University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, Colorado, UC-Davis, UWash, Mississippi State, Georgia Tech, Maryland, RPI, etc., etc. Remove your head from your boilermaker…

RogerMcK
February 24, 2012 at 5:41 pm

The big question about here is who was damaged? Was anybody injured or killed as a result of the faulty valves? If the vavlves were replaced free of charge & Weber found another manufacturer for quality valves, what jury in the WORLD would find for the plaintiff? I joined in a class-action suit againast Apple years ago about a guaranteed support issue. I didn’t get a dime.

If I was Weber, I’d drag it out for years. Who knows, if the economy turns around, they’ll still be selling grills.

Or spin-off another company, let the old Weber declare bankruptcy, and all the lawyers can kiss their ass.

Your thoughts?

Steve
March 4, 2012 at 4:20 am

Who was hurt? Let me list a few parties:

1) Manufactures of valves in the US who should have gotten that business in the first place.
2) Other manufactures of grills what actually are made in the US. They are hurt with paying higher prices for components because they didn’t buy valves overseas and saved money
3) China (or wherever) manufactures of grills who were competing with Weber and losing business based on their made in the US slogan when they weren’t.
4) Consumers who chose a made in the US grill for a reason (whatever that was) and suffered the disappointment of having been lied to.

Would you like me to continue?

Big T
February 24, 2012 at 6:16 pm

Two words: loser pays. If the loser of a lawsuit had to pay the defendant’s legal fees, there would be far fewer frivolous lawsuits and far fewer people (and lawyers) treating the legal system like a lottery.

Happy Heyoka
February 24, 2012 at 8:35 pm

It already happens that way, at least where I live… if you sue and you lose, you pay both your costs and those of of the folks you sued.

I know because this happened to me and was my first introduction to the concept that the law is not necessarily about justice.

I didn’t think my suit was frivolous. My opponents were a big insurance company (ie: their costs were huge). My lawyer was a cowboy who knew he was going to get paid either way, so he didn’t bother explaining any of that.

I can see that the outcome of Weber thing is that they will just have to turn around a sue the company making the valve… probably putting them out of business and assuring the outcome that only the bad valves are available on the market.

Roger
February 24, 2012 at 8:43 pm

That is how it works in the UK where there is considerably less of this kind of wasteful lawsuit. However things won’t change in the US until Congress and Senate aren’t almost made up of lawyers.

I have 2 stories about this: A Weber story and a class action lawsuit story. They are not related.

Weber story – I once bought a Weber grill (red) and there were a couple small bubbles in the paint. No big deal, but I thought they should know about it, so I mentioned it on the customer registration card. I got a phone call saying they’d like to replace it for free. It was already put together so I declined. They sent me the new shell anyway. For Free. Without me sending in the old one. So I got almost a whole extra grill for free. I’m a big fan.

Class action story – I was once in a class that was suing Prudential for a gas drilling investment they said was sold improperly. Mine wasn’t sold wrong, – I was told of the risks but I had the option to do nothing and get whatever award the judge gave out OR join the class, be represented by the lawyer doing that gig and get what they could win for the class. I chose to join the class. The law firm was awful – had me fill out tons of paper work, send notices by 3rd class mail so I got them late etc. I send them a real nasty letter explaining in expletive-laced language that I wasn’t happy with their service. They fired me as a client. So I ended up getting a check based on what the judge gave out. Somehow I ended up still on the law firm’s mailing list so I got a report of what I would have gotten had I remained their client. It was LESS than I got without their representation. Go Figure.

Zubes
February 24, 2012 at 7:12 pm

Americans need to stop blaming Asia for thier problems. No one has a right to economic growth and prosperity. You have spent most of the last decade shooting yourselves in the foot – stupid wars, GFC, Enron, lawyers etc…

PLu
February 26, 2012 at 4:47 pm

Correction: EVERYONE has a right to prosperity—-with hard work to earn it. Go get it, don’t wait for it to be handed to you.

It sort of reminds me of a similar issue – having to pay your garbage company extra for a recycle bin in addition to your trash bin. Punishing the folks that are trying to do the right thing.

When I first encountered that very issue when I moved to SC in the mid 90’s I raised hell, got nowhere, but having just moved there after working in Boulder for 3 yrs, I bucked up and paid the extra dough to do the right thing, _knowing_ I was doing the right thing.

Yeah, that don’t work for big companies, I know. But perhaps both problems have the same solution. Make it more expensive to do the “wrong thing”: charge more for garbage pickup to houses that don’t have and use their recycle bins. They need to find some way to make it more expensive for companies to operate here that choose to offshore in order to hide from liability.

Tariffs? Increased liability insurance coverage? Dunno – got to be some way to even the playing field for companies like Weber that are trying to do the right thing both for their customers and America.

Nugent
February 27, 2012 at 11:23 am

So you “just knew” it was the right thing? No studies, no investigation? Not curious why the economics do not favor recycling? That is religion, not engineering.

Mindless regulations enacted in this philosophy are a large part of the problem.

Agreed. Another example is that in many parts of the world where electricity is produced from fossil fuels, it’s more expensive, more wasteful of energy, and causes greater polution to use electric cars.

Doug Nickerson
February 24, 2012 at 8:36 pm

This would not be a story if you geeks knew how to build a fire yourself!

Rob K
February 24, 2012 at 9:50 pm

Grills and Purdue? I thought this was going to be another story about George Goble lighting charcoal grills with liquid oxygen.

Dave
February 25, 2012 at 5:53 am

First thing I thought of too!

Joseph Poirier
March 1, 2012 at 8:57 pm

I immediately thought of George Goble from Purdue as well! I am a Purdue grad and worked for a short time at ECN.

How about shipping 100,000 parts that are 100% out-of-spec and non-functional for building Viet-nam era cutting edge 1000-digitally-synthesized-channels field radios for Uncle Sam just to “get dollars-shipped on the books” … ?

We do it to ourselves … Weber did it to itself … and the fingers point everywhere except at OURSELVES, the ones who knew what’s going on, but remain silent to collect another paycheck and “keep the job.”

if you ever sourced computer parts, you’d understand. 10% of everything is defective from the box. everything.

that’s the baseline our friends manufacturing Stuff on whichever island was above water Tuesday are used to meeting. I suspect this issue, like many others, comes from taking blueprints in English measurements and converting them into Metric. round one up, round one down, what ya know? — it whistles with leaking gas. but it whistles in the boss’ key — ship it.

Cringe’s buddy has his fixed. Weber should do a recall and then the issue is cleared up. on initiation of a recall, replacing all the fails in the field, class-action lawsuits for that issue should be banned.

that’s how it would work if everybody gives up on the pathethic field of candidates this year and begs me to assume Benevolent Dictatorship for Three Lives.

Carl E Eriksson, Sweden
February 24, 2012 at 11:30 pm

Interesting American idea: made in the USA = quality, made in China quality.

Design and quality control is what engineers are for.

Nigel
February 25, 2012 at 1:23 am

Agreed. It’s like anything which gets complicated – someone will figure out a way to leverage a margin or take advantage of a loophole. We’re at a point where it is virtually impossible to simplify the rules in place. To the detriment of true innovation.

I understand this story also covers public safety and is something we all ought to be keen to protect. It’s just a shame more isn’t done to protect our own manufacturing capabilities. More done to promote and encourage.

Jack Kucera
February 25, 2012 at 2:57 am

Bob,

I agree, we don’t need to kill all the lawyers. I think 90% would be adequate.

Jack

John
February 25, 2012 at 3:15 am

The friend said it himself, the supplier was the one who sent production overseas, not Weber, and the rest of the grill is made in the U.S.

So another bunch of ambulance chasing lawyers was able to victimize what many believe is a reputable company of quality products, no doubt initiated by an ignorant owner unaware of the realities of modern global supply chains. Probably the same type unaware that their All American vehicle is probably assembled in Mexico or Canada with parts from around the world.

The really unfortunate part is that Weber’s reputation has been tarnished. Those who do cook outdoors more than once or twice a year know that their products are top quality, as is their customer service.

Ironically, Weber does market a line of foreign-made gas grills, which are reflected in their lower cost.

Ronp123
February 25, 2012 at 4:50 am

speaking of the curiosity of Purdue engineering students check this video of a competition held back in the 90’s at Purdue – Who could light a grill the fastest:

Perdue has a law school, right? what happens if you fill the lecture halls with LOX?

Craig
February 25, 2012 at 5:06 am

Interesting column Bob
It makes you think about what you value, interesting that the accountants and wall street guys earn more than the engineers.
So the best and brightest don’t go into engineering, they go to wall street and you get Enron and the GFC.
One of my mentors always said what gets rewarded get done, while you pay big bonuses for more and more complicated systems to disguise the value of whats going on you will get more of that, and you can guess were that is going to take you

Stephen Johnson
February 25, 2012 at 5:52 am

Maybe we need better juries and judges so that these lawsuits would be thrown out when they are frivolous and move forward when they have merit.

How about a different idea?
Why don’t we decide that NAFTA and the like have destroyed the American middle class. Everyone complains about the problem but no one seems to tie it into “free” trade agreements.
Free trade = trying to bring the rest of the world closer to my standard of living, at the cost of MY standard of living.

Roger
February 26, 2012 at 7:27 pm

Great idea. You make markets smaller and things get better. So why not also make states cut themselves off from each other. Those people in California get so much more than Alabama and we don’t want to be dragged down to the ‘bama level. Heck why not make them even smaller and do it by county or town. Actually you know what, sod everyone else and just do everything for yourself – that should work out best.

Incidentally the latter is known as subsistence and is not a road to prosperity. Markets and trade are a good thing – they lift all boats as the metaphor goes. Wealthier Chinese can buy more American products. Lookup “The Rational Optimist” if you want a good perspective on the future.

LarryD
February 28, 2012 at 2:04 pm

The whole reason the Constitution give Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce is because the states were engaging in protectionism during the Confederation period.

Jiminator
February 25, 2012 at 6:55 am

Wouldn’t it be prudent for the manufacturer to simply add a tag to the grill with language to the effect that in using the product the owner agrees that arbitration is their only recourse should any legal dispute arise?

This is my grill. I love it. Take a close look at it and note the thoughtfulness of the design. Weber’s team could probably work for Apple.

It is not right that a law firm found a way to make a quick $million on a simple mistake. This is one of those cases where I really thing the punishment needs to fit the crime. Mistakes and accidents are not crimes. There are firms who try to ignore their mistakes and accidents. Then there is Weber who is legendary for standing behind their products and taking care of their customers.

Shame on the legal profession!

Travers
February 25, 2012 at 9:06 am

It’s also a story about manufacturing clusters. From the NY times article about Chinese manufacturing where the screw factory is down the block from the factories that use them, manufacturing companies need clusters of supporting companies. And the clusters are evaporating. Weber probably got their valves from nearby in the old days, but when that company went under or moved overseas, they had no choice but to find new suppliers. But they can’t just drive over and talk with the managers and engineers anymore from their suppliers.

Of course China has *gasp* an industrial policy to encourage and support manufacturing clustering in special regions. That’s socialism, you cry! Yet it’s working. Just sayin’!

TimH
February 25, 2012 at 9:37 am

The misunderstanding about class actions persists. They exist as a legal remedy to large companies abusing very many people for small amounts, too small for victims to bother with even small claims court. The legal remedy is to punish the company by the settlement, not recover the loss for the claimants, to stop the company doing it again. With that premise, it doesn’t matter where the settlement money goes. Since the lawsuit is long and high risk (big company = big lawyering), usually the class lawyers take most of pot. If they couldn’t, class actions would disappear.

Dg
February 25, 2012 at 12:24 pm

The US taxes Chinese imports at 5%, but China taxes US imports at 20% plus other duties. Economists tell us that free trade can make us wealthy, but when a $28K US made Jeep Cherokee ends up costing $85K in China its clear the game is rigged against US manufacturers.

So forget killing all the lawyers (for now), better to kill the unfair rigged trade deals that give companies like Weber the incentive buy from offshore manufacturers in the first place.

Matthew
February 25, 2012 at 1:27 pm

If Weber truly acted appropriately, contacting as many customers as they could, sending out notices to stores that sell the product, then they won’t lose the case. They can easily establish that when they discovered the problem, they took steps to fix it and will still replace the defective part.

Now, there are going to be a large number of customers who don’t fill out warranty cards, so Weber couldn’t contact them directly about the issue. If Weber didn’t take proper steps to try and reach these people (flyers in stores, reporting to Consumer Reports and other media), then those people have a case that Weber didn’t follow proper practice.

If you were reporting on a case where Weber did everything they could do and a judge still ruled they were in violation, then you have a story. But it seems the legal system is working the way it’s supposed to. The lawyers for the class action suit are spending their money to go out and find evidence, contacting every owner that Weber has in their system, putting out feelers for owners who didn’t fill out warranties, in order to build a case. Presumably, Weber’s attorneys already did the hard work of figuring out whether the company was covered when the company decided to issue a recall and replace parts.

Did you bother to contact Weber for a statement (they probably couldn’t give one, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask)? And your story doesn’t make clear whether your friend noticed a problem with his propane tanks, called up Weber, and received the parts. Or he noticed the problem and Weber sent him the parts without him having to call.

If Weber was only sending replacement parts to people who call, then there is grounds for a class action suit. A propane leak is a very dangerous thing.

Tim
February 25, 2012 at 2:51 pm

Lawyers like the ones suing Weber are scum, hurting America, and should be put out of business and forced to take up a different more honorable profession.

I would. That being said, the problem with the American manufacturing industry is far too complex to explain in just one article and there isn’t any one group or circumstance to blame.

For example, on Amazon.com, the price of the basic Weber One-Touch Kettle Grill is about $99. Although I’m unable to find any historical price information, I would be willing to bet that $99 price has been the same for at least 20 years in spite of the fact that fuel and electricity cost something like five times more.

Consumers want high-quality products, but they don’t want to — or can’t — pay what those products are actually worth. Manufacturers still want to make a profit, so to keep putting products on the market at low price points, they can either cut corners or use overseas labor.

I haven’t got a solution, but stories like this one are only signs of a much, much deeper problem.

Here is a small piece of the overall problem. After the end of WWII, the United States had a virtual monopoly on manufacturing due to the destruction in Europe caused by the war. Also, China and other Asian nations lacked the technology needed to build an industrial base. Thus, the American people got used to a rising standard of living, without knowing the reasons for this windfall.

Enter the increasing practice of various special interests bribing the US Government to give them an undeserved advantage. Examples are imposing “free” trade agreements, using offshore cheap labor, providing technology to Asian nations, allowing foreign workers into the country, and so on. What should have happened were restrictions on excessive technology transfers and imposition of reasonable tariffs to protect, for example. US workers might have had a slowing of the rise in living standards, but not the dramatic declines we have experienced. Of course, the “Masters of the Universe” have had a tremendous increase in their ill-gotten wealth.

Personally I think that massive bribes by special interests that cause immense harm to the country and its citizens should be treated as what they really are – treason! (Just my opinion of course.)

Ronc
February 26, 2012 at 3:11 pm

“…bribes by special interests that cause immense harm to the country…” Yes, that should be illegal and punished. However, it’s not always clear whether something has caused harm just because it brought competition to the US. Those of us who bought cars and tried to work on them in the 60’s are well aware of the ongoing maintenance issues, such that there was talk of making disposable cars that would be junked after 3 years. No one thought of making better cars until the inexpensive German and Japanese cars started coming in. They showed us that cars can be cheap, self servicable, and last over 100,000 miles. American cars finally caught up, although with fewer models.

Quite true, Ronc. Fair competition, as opposed to unfair competition due to ultra cheap labor or stolen technology, is a great motivator. As to defining unfair competition, that is a question of common sense. Common sense does not of course include massive bribery to gain an unfair advantage.

Well, since you asked: I think that filing law suits is a VERY American business. And that Weber should sue to cheap-o overseas valve company for supplying a poor product which resulted in a class action law suit. And file for punitive damages for damaging the Weber reputation.

David W.
February 25, 2012 at 8:04 pm

Class action lawsuits can keep corporations honest. Think about that famed Pinto lawsuit. Then again, their’s legal fishing. You see it all the time. “Did you use any manufactured product? Do you know that you might have been injured by it? Call us at 1-800-SUE-THEM, and we’ll make sure you get every penny you deserve!”.

The problem isn’t that there are “too many lawyers”. The problem isn’t class action lawsuits. The problem is that it’s many times easier and cheaper to concede than to go into a full legal fight. How much does it cost Weber to hire an attorney? What if the opposing legal team decide to do some discovery? Even if Weber has nothing to hide, it might find itself spending millions just to get through the discovery process.

A simple fix might be the judge asking the plaintiff to fix the issue without the suit moving forward if the judge doesn’t find malice on the part of the plaintiff. For example, the judge might determine that Weber believed their grill was American made despite this one part, and that Weber was willing to replace the part with an American made one. Case dismissed! No pay for the plaintiff’s attorneys.

Another might be to give the judge the discretion to ask the plaintiff to prove that a significant number of people in the claimed class want the suit to move forward. A simple survey would be fine. Ask 100 people who’ve bought these grills if they’ve felt aggrieved because this one valve wasn’t American made. Would they still have bought the grill at the price they paid? No? Case dismissed.

These steps would allow class-action suits to do what they do best while removing much of the bogus suits that are more for enriching certain lawyers than helping the plaintiffs.

Patrick
February 25, 2012 at 9:46 pm

“I’m not suggesting that we first kill all the lawyers.” Well, how about most of them? No where do I travel in the world do I see life so narrowly restricted to what we now have, be it children’s playgrounds to Weber’s, thanks to the threat of litigation.

By the way, I travel a lot in France, where I rarely visit a household without a Weber – no exaggeration.

Mark Hewis
February 26, 2012 at 1:25 am

I have a Webber BBQ here in UK ( imported from US ) . It was 120 pounds as a wedding present 5 years ago and since then has cooked delicious kebabs, whole chickens, roasts, burgers, fish – the works.

But I would probably have expected it to be 40-70 pounds ( like the rest of the China made BBQ’s in supermarket ) if it had ‘made in china’ on it due to lifetime and quality expectations.

I wonder what sort of world we would live in if people kept goods before replacement twice as long as now but expected to pay 1.5times as much? Tiny margins on offshore pay would be swamped by the need to keep a tight local eye on assembly and quality control as lower volumes would mean a brand damage would devastate the company. Also less transport and recycling.

Dan
February 26, 2012 at 4:04 am

I’ll give you a different take on the class action lawsuit.

The interesting aspect of the class action lawsuit is that it extinguishes the legal claims of the customers. If you are a potential class member, opting out is deliberately made to be a pain. When the class action settlement is final, it is final, you have had your day in court. Typically the lawyers involved get a very large fraction of the compensation, frequently rigged so the lawyers get cash and the class members get something of little value.

This presents an obvious opportunity for collusion on the part of the company and the lawyers. The company knows first when they might have a problem. I am certain it would be unethical for the company to let friendly lawyers know about the situation, but people have families and friends, and those people have their own families and friends. Word can leak out.

When word leaks out to the right set of lawyers, they can sue the company, negotiate a settlement that gives them most of the money – and the customers no longer have a claim. This is obviously a very efficient way to solve the problem for everybody but the customer.

So, it would be interesting to look for patterns of companies being sued unexpectedly quickly for problems, when the same companies and law firms keep showing up time and time again with settlements that seem to be well within the range that the company could consider a normal business expense, and that provide the customers essentially no recourse.

I’m no fan of lawyers, and yes, the present system encourages abuse. But ever since Ford MoCo’s in-house council and accountants figured out that fixing the Pinto’s gas tank ignition problems would probably cost more than paying out the lawsuits of those people likely to be killed and disfigured by fiery rear-end collisions, I’ve had little sympathy for big corporations and their complaints about lawsuits.

Do the product liability lawyers get too much of the pie? I always thought so – until I read John Grisham’s “The King of Torts.” Turns out the economics of such suits aren’t that much different than those of venture capitalism: the few winners have to pay for the many losers.

Eventually the business mafia will probably succeed in getting laws passed to cap awards. The figure I keep hearing is $250,000. If you get permanently disabled – say by burning up in a car (or on a grill) – while still relatively young, you try to pay for food, shelter, and ongoing medical expenses for 30 or 40 years with a quarter million. Can’t be done.

I do have sympathy for those businesses caught up in frivolous lawsuits, but if the pendulum swings too far towards protecting the truly irresponsible corporations out there, they will eventually be able to get away with ANYTHING.

Make is compulsory to tell your clients up front that your award could “Honestly” range from $50 to $5 ea. Problem is that would require the law firm in question to be more or less honest about the outcome. Before you suggest thats not a number they could come up with, we all know if they did not have a good idea how much money they could make, they would never take on the case. If a long list of plaintiffs got that they only had $5 in it, they might not choose to move ahead and deprive the firm of that sweet $1,000,000.

At that point, of the lawyers want to make ANY MONEY on this stuff, then THEY will have to just come up with something that works.

Anyone who says greed is the problem and the solution it to make people less greedy is terribly naive. Greed is human nature, it’s perfectly rational, and it will never go anywhere.

The real solution is simple, but unpopular. We have to make it cheaper to employ Americans by relaxing labor restrictions. The difficulty here doesn’t lie in finding the solution to our problem. The difficulty lies in making people realize they aren’t entitled to live like kings just because they were born in America. The upside is that *when* (not if) it gets cheaper to employ Americans, more Americans will be occupying themselves with useful, wealth producing jobs, which means more wealth will be produced and everyone’s standard of living will actually go up in the long run.

Exactly! All these Americans living like kings will have to learn that they should not have taken the steady increase in income for the last 40 years, even as productivity went down and corporate profits remained flat.

You’re friend should just ignore it and move on with his life, read a book on gardening, vegetarian food or something. If you get caught up on every little hangup or something not perfect, might as well crawl into a hole for awhile. Life isn’t perfect nor should it be, anyone trying to do or say otherwise is probably living in the past.

Maybe not “all” the lawyers, just the ones that file frivolous, class-action suits with the sole purpose of getting the $1M payday, while those named in the “class action” get $5.

Robert Medan
February 27, 2012 at 12:24 pm

I do not want to see Weber take their manufacturing overseas. I bought a Weber gas grille in 1993. I still have it and use it a minimum of 3 times a week all year round. You can’t break them or kill them no matter what. I have replaced the grilling racks a few times, but other than that, they last. Everyone I know had gone through numerous expensive designer grilles and can’t figure out how I have the same old one. They will be finished once they stop doing what made them great- making top quality products in the US.

Ridiculous. If they were slapping “Made in the USA” on a BBQ manufactured entirely in China, that would be false advertising. But I defy anyone to find me a manufactured product with moving parts and more than three components that doesn’t use SOME parts made in other countries. I’ll bet even most Chinese-made manufactured goods have some components made in the USA or Japan or Thailand. Remember how the massive Thai floods almost paralyzed the hard drive industry worldwide?

And I agree, the hair-trigger lawsuit gene in your country is a form of nuclear threat hovering over every domestic manufacturer. We get lawsuits in Canada, even frivolous ones, but Canadian courts cap potential lawsuit payouts and have been known to mete out pretty harsh penalties for initiating frivolous suits, so there’s far less incentive for ambulance-chasers to roll the dice.

Magnum
February 27, 2012 at 8:12 pm

“Most of their products go into small propane heating products, like the stoves in RVs”

So thanks to multinationals trying to save a few cents on parts consumers will lose dollars worth of propane?

What if this is also happening for methane, which is a more effectivel greenhouse gas than CO2?

Good Jobs might be created building high speed trains. A TGV train can travel 432kms (L.A.-to-San Francisco?) in 2.7 hours. The lawyers are killing these honest jobs. The oil companies( Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, the American Petroleum Institute, Delta Airlines, the National Air Transportation Association and, the Koch Family Foundation.) are doing their best:

From the nytimes:
“While defining unlimited is difficult, AT&T does know how to define one thing clearly. The company’s terms-of-service agreement, to which every wireless customer must agree to use its products, forbids people from filing class-action lawsuits against it “

walker
March 2, 2012 at 12:09 pm

Premise 1: Anecdotal story about diligent American manufacturing firm which has survived x,y,z cyclical trends

Premise 2: Anecdotal story about lawyers/lawmakers/ignorant consumers making life difficult for aforementioned manufacturer

Conclusion: American manufacturing is going extinct, and it’s all because of lawyers!

They do in civilized countries like Sweden and Germany. Not in America, where the bottom-feeding criminals are called “rich people”, worshipped as gods, and get special privileges like low taxes. They hold power by purchasing lawmakers outright, and also by herding millions of of white trash voting zombies with fear, anger, greed, lies, propaganda, jingoistic jingles, bright colors, and shiny objects.

Ronc
March 10, 2012 at 2:45 pm

And some people blame their problems on the system. I’ve made lots of mistakes, but they’re my mistakes.

In another 20 years is it even going to matter? When we have machines that can build anything – who will want soul-sucking manufacturing jobs (aside from a few specialty craftsmen who like doing very specialized things for the fun of it — hardly ‘productive’ in the ‘makes gazillions of widgets’ point of view/measurement).

Scott
March 12, 2012 at 10:40 am

Many people like factory assembly jobs, and not everyone is suited to jobs in the information, creative or service areas that are the other options.

That said, manufacturing jobs aren’t showing many signs of being completely replaced by machines any time soon. After all people have been predicting the imminent replacement of human workers by machines pretty consistently for the last 150 years.

Gordon
March 9, 2012 at 2:33 pm

To add one more anecdote: I own a Samsung TV, with a power supply that died due to bad capacitors after (of course) the warranty had expired. Checking google, I found that many many others had the same problem. Armed with this knowledge, I called up Samsung loaded for bear; but I never got a shot off. Practically before I finished explaining the problem, they said they’d send someone to my house to replace the capacitors, for free. And they did, and the TV has been fine ever since. Fast forward about 9 months, and I receive notice of a class action lawsuit against Samsung based on faulty capacitors, with a settlement in which Samsung would repair the TVs – something they were doing anyway – and pay about half a million in lawyers’ fees.

I’m quite sure it wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts that Samsung started fixing out-of-warranty TV’s; fear of class action lawsuits was, I’m sure, a stronger motivation. So that’s a point in favor of such lawsuits. But they were slapped with one anyway. This is where I start to question the system. There is clearly no benefit to consumers, and there is most definitely harm to companies. So while you may question the frequency of these kinds of lawsuits, or the reaction of manufacturing companies, you can’t question the fact that there’s something wrong with the system.

Ronc
March 9, 2012 at 3:29 pm

Perhaps they should have issued a recall instead of waiting for each individual customer to complain.

Scott
March 12, 2012 at 10:43 am

More spam.

Since there are nofollow tags in place, I can’t see what they hope to gain from these.

Ronc
March 12, 2012 at 2:26 pm

They hope to gain visitors to the website linked to in the name. A simple solution would be for the blogging platform to not permit website links to be associated with the name of the poster. Perhaps Bob can turn that option off by eliminating the “website” box.

Fred
March 13, 2012 at 4:18 am

While reading the story, I kept wondering about the poor people who have these faulty shut off valves in their RV propane heating systems. Seems a lot more dangerous the a leak in an outdoor grill.

Ramjet
March 19, 2012 at 12:03 pm

The problem, like so many, stems from the written word. The cynical and self interested always will exploit phrases designed to advertise and encapsulate, rather than to offer a cast iron promise (no pun intended). I wonder if their firm has a motto to impress clients, and whether they ever manage to live up to it.

As a current and long time user of Weber kettles, I lost faith in them as a company after a chat I had online with a company representative over their switching to plastic handles from wood, which they had used in years past. My chief complaint was that the lid handle now became hot enough to cause burns to the hand, whereas the wooden handle never posed that threat. Their response? “Use a potholder”. I told them I thought products were supposed to improve with time, not become worse. I guess with all those plastic parts they use on the gas models, they figured they might as well make the handles for the charcoal models as well, and save the money spent on old fashioned wood handles. You know, the ones that didn’t burn you when used without a potholder…

A fascinating discussion is worth comment. There’s no doubt that that you need to publish more about this issue, it might not be a taboo subject but generally folks don’t discuss these issues. To the next! Kind regards!!